Women Won't Elect A Fat-Shamer-In-Chief

FILE - In this June 7, 2016 file photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. Powered by a solid triumph in California, Hillary Clinton seizes her place in history as the first women to become a presumptive presidential nominee and sets out to unite a fractured party to confront Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

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GOP nominee Donald Trump has been fat-shaming women for decades, which probably won't help him dig out of his hole with female voters.

“She threw herself into my arms, sobbing and crying and saying, ‘Donald doesn’t want me anymore. He has told me he can’t be sexually attracted to a woman who has had children,’” columnist Liz Smith recently recalled to PBS.

According to a 1990 Vanity Fair story, Ivana Trump underwent a face-lift and breast augmentation to try to appeal to her husband, but he continued to body-shame her while he was seeing Marla Maples:

He began belittling her: “That dress is terrible.” “You’re showing too much cleavage.” “You never spend enough time with the children.” “Who would touch those plastic breasts?” Ivana told her friends that Donald had stopped sleeping with her. She blamed herself.

In 1996, when Trump owned the Miss Universe pageant, he called Venezuelan contestant Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy” because he thought she’d gained too much weight after winning the Miss Universe crown. Machado said the insults caused her to develop a severe eating disorder, like many other women who resorted to desperate measures to meet society’s beauty standards.

But none of this has changed Donald Trump’s fat-shaming tendencies. As Americans embrace an unprecedented body positivity movement, the nation is also potentially weeks away from electing a president who viciously and unapologetically criticizes women’s bodies.

“She was the worst we ever had,” Trump said of Miss Universe winner Machado this week, echoing his “Miss Piggy” comments from two decades ago. “She was the winner, and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.”

“That is embarrassing,” said Kim Gray, a Trump backer in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “I have a daughter. I have a son who’d never speak like that.”

Women’s votes matter: President Barack Obama defeated his GOP opponent Mitt Romney in 2012 thanks partly to overwhelming support from women. While there was a historic gender gap in that election, the gender gap in 2016 is shaping up to be even more extreme: A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found Clinton leading by 19 points among women and Trump leading by 19 points among men. But women tend to turn out to the polls in greater numbers: In 2012, female voters made up 53 percent of the electorate. Similar numbers this year could spell trouble for Trump.

“I know this may be hard for you to comprehend,” actress Dawn Neufeld tweeted on Wednesday, “but it’s not okay to publicly fat-shame people when you’re running for president (or ever).”